Day 6, Part I
Split, Croatia – Mostar, Bosnia and Herzegovina
It was time to leave Split and the apartment and head in a more Easterly direction towards the unknown. We didn’t really know what Bosnia would be like, apart from what the girls told us in Ljubljana. We couldn’t get anything from Google Maps about Sarajevo, but a grey area with a road running through it. There was also no information about the landscape, either. But we thought we’d go for it, anyway.
After filling the car, we got some stuff from the shop at the bottom of the road. The car, however, needed a good cleaning. It’s a red car, but today it was yellow. The amount of dust and dirt flung up from the roads just covered my car along the journey. But the roads will only get worse, I thought, so was there much point in cleaning it now only for it to get dirty again?
Finding a way out of Split was much easier than finding a way in. It was daytime now meaning I could see better and I wasn’t as tired, either. There was a short motorway heading to the border, so we thought we’d use that, especially as the toll would take up all of our remaining currencies. However, finding that wasn’t to be. For some reason, the signs for it disappeared, something we were well used to by now. We continued along the coastal road until it took us into Bosnia, which was equally picturesque as the parts on the other side of Split. We drove along through seaside villages, all with creamy white walls, small windows and red tiled roofs, and with Hvar by our side, a long island running parallel to the coastline.
We finally turned inland and away from the coast and towards the border of Bosnia and Herzegovina. We came to the last Croatian town, wondering when the border would pop up, and then we saw it. Two booths, the first with the red, white and blue shielded flag of Croatia, and the other with white stars running diagonally down the yellow triangle on a blue background. To me, the Bosnian flag had something reassuring and modern, and something telling me that the country was welcoming, even though it was still scarred by the war that tore it apart not so long ago.
At the border, however, there was just the one hitch. The Green Card. They asked for it, but I didn’t have it, unaware that I could get one for here. I’ve heard that some insurance companies don’t even hand them out for certain parts of the world. I had that terrible feeling that this could be the end, or at least as far as driving was concerned, but that was not an option. I would rather turn back and go home instead of ditching my car in No Man’s Land between two Balkan countries.
The images of Mostar, Sarajevo and possibly a lot more started to fade as I tried to think what to do. Luckily, I found out I could get a Green Card for the equivalent of twenty Euros at the border, but I didn’t have anything adding up to that much on me, and annoyingly, there was no cash point machine at the border. And so back into Croatia it was.
The town we just drove through a few minutes before happened to be big enough to have a shopping centre and a couple of banks, providing us with enough money to get the Green Card that would allow the car across the border.
And finally into the Herzegovinian part of the country, we drive along dusty, bad surfaced roads, passing farmland and old buildings, either shelled during the war or abandoned as the occupants left the area, either fled during the war or left to find better work in better places. The buildings that were still occupied were not in much better condition, either.
The architecture didn’t seem much different from Croatia, but they were much worn down here. The plaster and brickwork were crumbling apart, plants and weeds were growing in the cracks of the walls and through window frames. However, for me, I saw my first traditional mosque, complete with a dome and a minaret, with its masonry decorated with arches and carvings in the stone.
The landscape of this new country was magnificent. Nothing seemed spoiled by large, ugly, high-rise towers. The farmland was of haystacks supported by large wooden poles; farmers drove their tiny tractor carts along the side of the road; cattle grazed in the green fields that ran over to the foot the whole way to the mountains. However, because of the war, the countryside was, and still is, littered with landmines, most of which are still active and pose a lethal threat for those who wish to hike around the peaceful, picturesque and unspoilt landscape.
But we drove on, passing a garage, with its thermometer reading twenty-nine degrees Celsius, and following the vandalised road signs towards Mostar, a city famous for its bridge and what happened to it during the war. Stari Most, or Old Bridge in English, may have given the name to the town, or as most means bridge, and there are a few of them spanning the river that runs through Mostar, could be the origin of the city’s name instead. To be honest, I'm not entirely sure, but they are my theories, anyway!
